Cat People (1942)

Oops. Due to a wait at the top of my Netflix queue, this got a "belated" delivery that I would have put off until next year if I had rearranged the queue in time. So The Babadook wasn't my last Halloween-type viewing after all. Shame.

Do not confuse the 1942 original with the 1982 remake. From what I hear, the latter is very overtly sexual, whereas the Hays Publication Code allowed nothing steamier than kisses -- and we see only one in this whole movie, for a plot-relevant reason.

It begins with one Irena Dubrovna intently drawing a panther at the zoo. She also draws the interest of one Oliver Reed (not the actor by that name), who courts and soon weds her, despite her standoffish behavior and lack of self-confidence in her worth as a wife. Oliver learns that she was raised on Serbian legends of people who turn into deadly, out-of-control big cats when sufficiently impassioned, and she believes herself to be one. He tries to convince her otherwise by introducing her to a psychiatrist, but that works as well as you'd expect. By the time her unromantic demeanor leads Oliver's heart to stray to a co-worker -- and the crooked shrink hopes that Irena's will stray to him -- we see evidence of truth to the legend....

The title is a little misleading. There is a second apparent cat person, but only briefly, serving as little more than foreboding as she identifies Irena as a kindred spirit.

And there's a lot of foreboding packed into a 73-minute story. That's really what made CP stand out at the time: a subtler approach to horror than in, say, 1941's The Wolf Man. If director Jacques Tourneur (I Walked with a Zombie, Night of the Demon) had fully had his way instead of the studio, we'd never see any panther other than the one behind bars. The film actually gets a secondary classification as film noir, but I'm sure it carried more influence on the horror genre.

Unfortunately, many viewers, myself included, feel that the pioneer hasn't aged well at all. The little-known actors don't offer much to impress us, tho I get that Irena is trying to keep her emotions to a dull, um, roar. The story is hard to buy: How can you be married a month and still not have kissed the bride? With the short run time, we have little idea what they saw in each other in the first place. Sometimes characters are ridiculously quick to catch on; other times they're annoyingly dim. Even the dialog can strain credulity in my mind.

The only scenes I could really appreciate involve "the other woman" feeling threatened by an unseen menace. There is no music during those moments. The buildup gives us the chills, if not quite enough of a payoff to make up for the rest.

Maybe you're one of the people who made the current 7.4 on IMDb possible. Maybe you're like the contemporary reviewers who dissed it at first but retracted their statements on second viewing. If you want my opinion, however, CP works better today as a history lesson than as a horror or a noir. Still probably more respectable than its seedy remake.